Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS '39 I cannot help but find Bloor's attempt to give language games an inner structure suspect in a Wittgenste~nian context. He reveals his aim by developing a typology of language games, Here he follows the anthropologist Mary Douglas in drawing a diagram of social structures, the point of which is to specify under what conditions a certain response to anomaly can be sustained. Wittgenstein set up language games as objects of comparison for clarifying the uses of language, and the suggestion that language games be structured according to a pattern of socially sustained boundaries which allows only a small number of possible responses to anomaly severely limits the scope of Wittgenstein's use of the concept. The aim of this reductionistic approach is clearly revealed when Bloor argues that Wittgenstein is a conservative thinker whose notion of "form of life," i.e., a pattern of natural and cultural activities that is shared by a linguistic community, is to be found in the area of the diagram where the boundaries separating groups according to ranks, station, and duties are high. This represents a traditional and authoritarian society where nature is made to carry a moral message and where convention and restraint make meaning possible, as opposed to a society informed (as one informed by Habermas's ideals would be) by the Enlightenment ideals of egalitarianism and individualism, which Bloor fears will lead to anarchy rather than to rational consensus . Wittgenstein may indeed have subscribed to an authoritarian ordering of society, but in suggesting that this forms the basis for an inner structure of language games, Bloor disregards Wittgenstein's point that, when the end of justifications are reached, all we can do is simply describe the familiar facts of what we do and what we say. Bloor's characterization of a conservative--"conservatives give Being priority over Thought" (16~)~further indicates his wish to go beyond Wittgenstein's point and ground language games in a theoretical framework that provides a law-like explanation for their formation. In sum, Bloor's study succeeds as a reading that links Wittgenstein imaginatively to the sociology of knowledge, but his attempt to build a social theory of knowledge by giving empirical substance to language games affords a somewhat biased interpretation of Wittgenstein's writings. BRITT-MARIE SCHILLER Washington University Thomas R. Flynn. Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Coaeof CollectiveResponsibility . Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. Pp. xiv + ~65. $~5.oo. Robert D. Cumming, the ablest of the American interpreters of existentialism, has judged this study to be "the fullest and best interpretation of Sartre's political philosophy ." I concur. The question whether Jean-Paul Sartre's later writings were "existentialist" or "Marxist" is a pons asinorura for interpreters. In the proliferating literature devoted to this question, one can find one's favorite thesis "demonstrated," whether it be that i4o JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~4:1 JANUARY 1986 Sartre uncritically falls prey to the Marxist dialectic or that he conforms Marxism to existentialism by reducing Marx to a caricature. Neither of these interpretations recognizes a genuine philosophical development in the course of Sartre's writings; the former finds Sartre sacrificing his early neo-Cartesianism outright, while the latter interpretation finds the early position simply reasserted in a different terminology. Flynn resists both the "existentialist" and the "Marxist" stereotypes, offering us a patient and subtle tracing of Sartre's real philosophical development. As in most careful studies of philosophers' careers, the result is a finding of both persistence and change--a reflective evolution. The book is a model of sympathetic exposition, which Flynn rightly holds to be a precondition for critical evaluation. There is none of the patronizing saving-Sartre-from-his-na'fve-blunders of some analytic studies of Sartre, nor is there the uncritical adulation occasionally served up by partisans of continental philosophy. This is not to say that Flynn has simply written a faithful recapitulation of Sartrean arguments. His exposition is guided by the particular aim of finding out whether a theory of collective responsibilitycan be elicited from the later Sartre. If one can induce from Sartre's post-war thinking a stand on collective...